Abstract
Multiagent research inherited its economic vocabulary of auctions, markets, prices, bargaining, and matching from a single observed case: human societies. Those institutions bundle identity, competence, execution, ownership, commitment, and settlement in ways that suit agents whose minds are private, who learn rather than copy skills, and who each persist as one person. Engineered agents need not share any of these constraints, making the list of familiar institutions look less like the entirety of economic organization and more like a sample from a larger, unmapped space. We sketch one way to make that space concrete: a provisional chart that records each institution, separately from the agents that run it, as a typed structure over positions, rights and duties, allocation, information, time, state, process, value, and external recognition. In this chart, named institutions become overlapping regions rather than fixed points, neighboring families separate along a few coordinates, and the gaps between them become places to search. We show what the shift in perspective buys with a simulation in which one technical act, copying an agent's competence, is institutionalized as a new independent supplier, as licensed capacity that creates no new participant, and as the splitting of one economic position into successors that inherit some obligations and not others. In a paired task, all three produce an identical technical trace despite differing in who exists, who owns the copy, who is obligated, and who gets paid. We close with a research program: building a principled chart of institution space, mapping how its implementable region shifts with agent capacities, and revising the chart wherever engineered agents expose distinctions it cannot express.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.15017
